When I first started work in the prepress department of a small print shop, my first day was basically a PageMaker crash course. It was easy to get the hang of, and I thought nothing more of it after I went home. That night, around 3 AM, I awakened with my foot hanging off the edge of the bed. The first thought that popped into my mind: "Oh gawd, it's not just outside the margin, it's off the PAGE..."
I don't have many game dreams. Ultima is about the only one that bothers to invade my sleep-time. I once dreamt that I was going down Westheimer looking for Dupre and Shamino. Don't ask.
A highly sophisticated (in most cases) sort of computer with no moving parts, powered mostly by oxygen, caffeine, and sugar, with nearly unlimited storage space (though it's not always all accessible when you need something from it) and an average working life of about 80 years. It never needs to be upgraded (would be a bit messy to try, anyway), and it needs no keyboard, mouse, or other input devices it didn't come with.
In short, I'm patenting the brain. Everyone pay up. Well, everyone except JonKatz. *runs like hell*
If it was my site's look-n-feel being "ripped off?" Hey, as long as it doesn't have my graphics or my content (and even then, I'd be fine with that as long as credit was given where due) on it, I'm cool with it. Hey, in the vast expanses of the Web, I'd be an idiot to think I could claim sole ownership of a couple of nested tables and a purple/gold/black color scheme. It's not only likely, but very possible, that someone out there could pull a design similar in look-n-feel to mine out of their brains, without ever seeing mine or even knowing it existed.
Real-world example: Look at a Conn's. Then look at a C*rc**t C*ty. One of 'em obviously copied the other--inside the store too. Similar building design, similar floor plans. Hell, even their radio ads sound the same. But you can still tell which is which without having to look for too long.
In a nutshell: Having a similar look-n-feel to another site/app/whatever is excusable IMO, as long as Joe Sixpack can still tell which is which.
"NOTE: Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the
United States and/or other countries."
Did anyone else find it sort of amusing that they made a big show out of putting "Adobe stuff belongs to Adobe" down there, but didn't make a peep about Macromedia?
God, please tell me I'm not the only person in the world that remembers this...blipverts!
Remember the pilot episode of Max Headroom? Where they were testing out these little ultra-compressed two-second or so commercials they called "blipverts?" They worked, but they had a minor unpleasant side effect...namely, causing people to randomly explode.
But then again, I think that if I see another damned Old Navy commercial, my brain will explode anyway, so I doubt anyone would notice the difference. ^_^
I went to junior high with a Vietnamese kid named Phuc. I believe it was actually pronounced "puck," but...well, you can probably guess.
That poor kid. Back in the day, the worst thing he had to worry about was a substitute teacher slaughtering his name at roll call. Now he's probably 25 or 26, with a nice little personal website, and cursing the censorware companies. ^_^
Sure, I've got the T-shirts up for download on my site. There's just one teensy problem: they haven't quite worked all the bugs out of the solid-matter-transmission protocol yet. You might get a T-shirt, you might get a bunch of string and fluff shooting out of your A: drive. And to get the package small enough to transfer, I had to compress the damn things so much you'll never get all the wrinkles out...
And hell, if the librarian is having a busy day, feeling a bit harassed, and not paying full attention to what he/she's doing, even that could slip by if the guy looks even vaguely like the picture on the card.
They claim their service is free, but toward the end of the registration process, they "request a donation." With no "nothing" option. And apparently (I didn't get past this as I have neither a credit card nor a bank account), you have to make a $10-$15+ donation every year. Sneaky.
Hey, not all Americans hate Canada. I'm actually quite grateful. Why? Because you gave us Rush (the band, not the fat nazi git). And you gave us Cheech & Chong.
In light of that, I can forgive y'all for Alanis Morrisette.
Exhibit A: Review of CyberSitter in PC Magazine a while back. Nothing but glowing praise.
Exhibit B: Recent reviews on the ZDNet site of various graphics programs. The hideously overpriced Photoshop received high marks, while the similarly-featured and much, much cheaper Paint Shop Pro 6 received a scathing review (from ZDNet staff, anyway; the staff gave it 2 out of 5, while readers gave it 4.5. What's wrong with this picture?)
Talk about the pot and the kettle. ZDNet appears to bias its reviews toward whichever company is buying the most ad space.
"Digital music files are like piano rolls." AAHHH! No! This is exactly what digital music files are NOT. Piano rolls are a manufactured product that has a cost in physical materials. Digital music files have no physical parts--they are pure information.
Well, if you're not thinking too hard about the way they're distributed as opposed to how they work, it's not too bad a metaphor. A piano roll is a roll of paper with holes poked in it. When a hole passes over an opening in the little suckerbarthingy (IANAplayerpianotechnician), the piano plays a note. If you think about it this way (warning: IANAprogrammer either, obviously, but bear with the bad fake code example):
if $hole=1 {play_note} else {nothing} #or, in other words, if $hole=0
One of these days, when I have money again, I am going to register something like www.dashdotatdashdotdotdotdash-dotdash.com just so I can have the hardest e-mail address in the world to give out over the phone. ^_^
MD will probably die fairly soon. It is Sony's child. And we all know what Sony did with Beta...
I am very leery of buying a MD player/recorder, not necessarily because of the recording quality, but because I'm afraid I'm going to cough up $200 for the next Betamax. Feh, I say.
One good place to look would be your local CoC. In most cases, your friendly neighborhood CoC will have a listing of local nonprofit groups, a lot of which probably need skilled folks to help out, or they may need your help themselves.
Sure, the idea that my boss might be reading my e-mail is disturbing. Fortunately, the place where I work (for now) has folks in mangleme^H^H^H^H^H^H management that trust the underlings and don't really give a shit what else they do on company time, as long as the work gets done sometime before 5. And they have no room to talk about employees sending personal e-mail over the company's connection anyway. ^_^
However...we are highly unlikely to have anyone doing anything particularly naughty over said connection. This is not the case everywhere.
Catching up on e-mail with distant relatives, taking care of insurance and such, quick cruises through eBay...hell, even the occasional (I said occasional, mind you ^_^) addition to the pr0n folder isn't that much cause for scrutiny. But if Odd Things begin happening, unexplained internal or external attacks on the system and such, I'd want to check up and make sure it's not because the disgruntled worker on the 38th floor is putting a "h3y d00ds c0m3 h4x0r th1s s3rv3r" APB out to the seedier side of the world. I wouldn't like it, I wouldn't enjoy it, but in some cases it just might be necessary. And I can only hope the majority of businesses feel the same way.
There is also that looming specter of "downsizing," to which I have just fallen prey...no matter how good you are at your job, there's always that little teeny chance that you won't have it next week. I'm jobless as of Friday because our salespeople aren't doing their job (selling web work); instead of doing the logical thing and firing the salespeople, they're canning me (I'm not bitter, really, and that urge to burst out of the web room screaming "J00 SUX0RZ!!!" at the top of my lungs is getting easier to suppress). What sucks is, I like this job, and I like this company...although I would sell a kidney to be able to telecommute.
Then again, the bright side is that I'll at least get a little vacation for the first time in two years.:}
A while back my dad calls me up. "$Friend brought me a computer," he said. "Can you come see if it's any good?" I know $Friend is in the habit of digging up odd bits of flotsam and giving them away to whoever will take them, so my spider-sense was tingling.
I get to Dad's house...to find a Colecovision ADAM, complete with monitor and printer, the whole schmazz, in pristine condition sitting there on the floor. My jaw dropped.
"What's it good for? A doorstop?" Dad asked.
"Does it work?"
"Think so." And Dad and I plugged all the crap in...and it did work. Wow.
But the next time I went to Dad's, the ADAM was gone. $Friend2 came over, saw it, and offered him a large undisclosed sum for it. Dad accepted.
Case in point: A couple of months back, I found (of all things) an old old old old original bloodline I'd cobbled up for VtM...in French. Since I no longer had the original document, I decided to run it through the Fish just for the hell of it.
And the fun began. The translation--what there was above the "end of translation" warning a little over halfway through--was rife with hilarious mistranslations, weirdly scrambled sentence structure, and perfectly mundane words left untranslated. It wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't trust my company's website to Babelfish.
SlightlyOT: Anyone know of a decent Web translator that understands Japanese?
Slashdot Mirror
When I first started work in the prepress department of a small print shop, my first day was basically a PageMaker crash course. It was easy to get the hang of, and I thought nothing more of it after I went home. That night, around 3 AM, I awakened with my foot hanging off the edge of the bed. The first thought that popped into my mind: "Oh gawd, it's not just outside the margin, it's off the PAGE..."
I don't have many game dreams. Ultima is about the only one that bothers to invade my sleep-time. I once dreamt that I was going down Westheimer looking for Dupre and Shamino. Don't ask.
Anyone remember the Pentium III, Pentium II and the Pentium without a number? The all were discovered to have some bug after they were launched.
Hyep. Remember, kids...at Intel, quality is job 0.99999999999998.
A highly sophisticated (in most cases) sort of computer with no moving parts, powered mostly by oxygen, caffeine, and sugar, with nearly unlimited storage space (though it's not always all accessible when you need something from it) and an average working life of about 80 years. It never needs to be upgraded (would be a bit messy to try, anyway), and it needs no keyboard, mouse, or other input devices it didn't come with.
In short, I'm patenting the brain. Everyone pay up. Well, everyone except JonKatz. *runs like hell*
If it was my site's look-n-feel being "ripped off?" Hey, as long as it doesn't have my graphics or my content (and even then, I'd be fine with that as long as credit was given where due) on it, I'm cool with it. Hey, in the vast expanses of the Web, I'd be an idiot to think I could claim sole ownership of a couple of nested tables and a purple/gold/black color scheme. It's not only likely, but very possible, that someone out there could pull a design similar in look-n-feel to mine out of their brains, without ever seeing mine or even knowing it existed.
Real-world example: Look at a Conn's. Then look at a C*rc**t C*ty. One of 'em obviously copied the other--inside the store too. Similar building design, similar floor plans. Hell, even their radio ads sound the same. But you can still tell which is which without having to look for too long.
In a nutshell: Having a similar look-n-feel to another site/app/whatever is excusable IMO, as long as Joe Sixpack can still tell which is which.
"NOTE: Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries."
Did anyone else find it sort of amusing that they made a big show out of putting "Adobe stuff belongs to Adobe" down there, but didn't make a peep about Macromedia?
I'm sorry, but which Texas do you live in? Apparently not the one in the real world, which I live in.
God, please tell me I'm not the only person in the world that remembers this...blipverts!
Remember the pilot episode of Max Headroom? Where they were testing out these little ultra-compressed two-second or so commercials they called "blipverts?" They worked, but they had a minor unpleasant side effect...namely, causing people to randomly explode.
But then again, I think that if I see another damned Old Navy commercial, my brain will explode anyway, so I doubt anyone would notice the difference. ^_^
You know, this reminds me.
I went to junior high with a Vietnamese kid named Phuc. I believe it was actually pronounced "puck," but...well, you can probably guess.
That poor kid. Back in the day, the worst thing he had to worry about was a substitute teacher slaughtering his name at roll call. Now he's probably 25 or 26, with a nice little personal website, and cursing the censorware companies. ^_^
Sure, I've got the T-shirts up for download on my site. There's just one teensy problem: they haven't quite worked all the bugs out of the solid-matter-transmission protocol yet. You might get a T-shirt, you might get a bunch of string and fluff shooting out of your A: drive. And to get the package small enough to transfer, I had to compress the damn things so much you'll never get all the wrinkles out...
And hell, if the librarian is having a busy day, feeling a bit harassed, and not paying full attention to what he/she's doing, even that could slip by if the guy looks even vaguely like the picture on the card.
Yeah, I tried to sign up with them.
They claim their service is free, but toward the end of the registration process, they "request a donation." With no "nothing" option. And apparently (I didn't get past this as I have neither a credit card nor a bank account), you have to make a $10-$15+ donation every year. Sneaky.
Hey, not all Americans hate Canada. I'm actually quite grateful. Why? Because you gave us Rush (the band, not the fat nazi git). And you gave us Cheech & Chong.
In light of that, I can forgive y'all for Alanis Morrisette.
*runs like hell*
*braces for incoming karma hit*
ZDNet has no room to talk about biased reviews.
Exhibit A: Review of CyberSitter in PC Magazine a while back. Nothing but glowing praise.
Exhibit B: Recent reviews on the ZDNet site of various graphics programs. The hideously overpriced Photoshop received high marks, while the similarly-featured and much, much cheaper Paint Shop Pro 6 received a scathing review (from ZDNet staff, anyway; the staff gave it 2 out of 5, while readers gave it 4.5. What's wrong with this picture?)
Talk about the pot and the kettle. ZDNet appears to bias its reviews toward whichever company is buying the most ad space.
Looks to me, judging from the tone of the site, that this is a big publicity stunt for his girlfriend. And that someone seriously needs a life.
Money I've spent buying CD's that I wouldn't have if I hadn't grabbed the MP3's first: $350, easy. Lots of imports, blah.
"Digital music files are like piano rolls."
AAHHH! No! This is exactly what digital music files are NOT. Piano rolls are a manufactured product that has a cost in physical materials. Digital music files have no physical parts--they are pure information.
Well, if you're not thinking too hard about the way they're distributed as opposed to how they work, it's not too bad a metaphor. A piano roll is a roll of paper with holes poked in it. When a hole passes over an opening in the little suckerbarthingy (IANAplayerpianotechnician), the piano plays a note. If you think about it this way (warning: IANAprogrammer either, obviously, but bear with the bad fake code example):
if $hole=1 {play_note}
else {nothing} #or, in other words, if $hole=0
it's not so much of a stretch. ^_^
One of these days, when I have money again, I am going to register something like www.dashdotatdashdotdotdotdash-dotdash.com just so I can have the hardest e-mail address in the world to give out over the phone. ^_^
MD will probably die fairly soon. It is Sony's child. And we all know what Sony did with Beta...
I am very leery of buying a MD player/recorder, not necessarily because of the recording quality, but because I'm afraid I'm going to cough up $200 for the next Betamax. Feh, I say.
...UF is having a field day with the X-hype. ^_^
One good place to look would be your local CoC. In most cases, your friendly neighborhood CoC will have a listing of local nonprofit groups, a lot of which probably need skilled folks to help out, or they may need your help themselves.
Sure, the idea that my boss might be reading my e-mail is disturbing. Fortunately, the place where I work (for now) has folks in mangleme^H^H^H^H^H^H management that trust the underlings and don't really give a shit what else they do on company time, as long as the work gets done sometime before 5. And they have no room to talk about employees sending personal e-mail over the company's connection anyway. ^_^
However...we are highly unlikely to have anyone doing anything particularly naughty over said connection. This is not the case everywhere.
Catching up on e-mail with distant relatives, taking care of insurance and such, quick cruises through eBay...hell, even the occasional (I said occasional, mind you ^_^) addition to the pr0n folder isn't that much cause for scrutiny. But if Odd Things begin happening, unexplained internal or external attacks on the system and such, I'd want to check up and make sure it's not because the disgruntled worker on the 38th floor is putting a "h3y d00ds c0m3 h4x0r th1s s3rv3r" APB out to the seedier side of the world. I wouldn't like it, I wouldn't enjoy it, but in some cases it just might be necessary. And I can only hope the majority of businesses feel the same way.
There is also that looming specter of "downsizing," to which I have just fallen prey...no matter how good you are at your job, there's always that little teeny chance that you won't have it next week. I'm jobless as of Friday because our salespeople aren't doing their job (selling web work); instead of doing the logical thing and firing the salespeople, they're canning me (I'm not bitter, really, and that urge to burst out of the web room screaming "J00 SUX0RZ!!!" at the top of my lungs is getting easier to suppress). What sucks is, I like this job, and I like this company...although I would sell a kidney to be able to telecommute.
:}
Then again, the bright side is that I'll at least get a little vacation for the first time in two years.
Oh. Oh jeezis.
A while back my dad calls me up. "$Friend brought me a computer," he said. "Can you come see if it's any good?" I know $Friend is in the habit of digging up odd bits of flotsam and giving them away to whoever will take them, so my spider-sense was tingling.
I get to Dad's house...to find a Colecovision ADAM, complete with monitor and printer, the whole schmazz, in pristine condition sitting there on the floor. My jaw dropped.
"What's it good for? A doorstop?" Dad asked.
"Does it work?"
"Think so." And Dad and I plugged all the crap in...and it did work. Wow.
But the next time I went to Dad's, the ADAM was gone. $Friend2 came over, saw it, and offered him a large undisclosed sum for it. Dad accepted.
I dunno, the Fish does...interesting things.
Case in point: A couple of months back, I found (of all things) an old old old old original bloodline I'd cobbled up for VtM...in French. Since I no longer had the original document, I decided to run it through the Fish just for the hell of it.
And the fun began. The translation--what there was above the "end of translation" warning a little over halfway through--was rife with hilarious mistranslations, weirdly scrambled sentence structure, and perfectly mundane words left untranslated. It wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't trust my company's website to Babelfish.
SlightlyOT: Anyone know of a decent Web translator that understands Japanese?